Shannon I guess you know that some things in life look pretty beautiful but they are quite dangerous and deadly. I suppose people who named it knew something bad happened there. There could be lack of water or many deadly predators. Who knows. I can give you an example. In my country located at the Balkans, we have this "valley of the kings" locals call it that way because there are tens of ancient Thracian king tombs. And many more, but my message got too long already ;)

As a high school student interested in photography I always turn to National Geographic for the best examples of great photography! If you would like to see my work it can be found here : http://maireadkahn.wordpress.com/

Thanks to everyone for your kind comments. I've been back to the same spot several times and found that I was incredibly lucky with the timing in that the rising Sun was shining through smoke from distant wildfires. Repeating this light would most likely be quite rare. It boils down to luck and just happening to be in the right place at the right time.

For those asking about the technical details; Nikon D3s, Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8 @25mm - f.4.5, 1600 ISO taken 10/25/2011, 7:32 am. This was a single 14bit RAW exposure and the sky was dodged one stop while the foreground was burned one stop. Some additional exposure, gamma, sharpening and dust removal were also performed. (I'm fairly sure that this info was taken from the same image as above. NG seems to have stripped the EXIF data from the above image)

My favorite version, that I use to actually print with, is a pseudo HDR version combining two separate exposures, one for the sky and the other for the foreground. The two images are then merged using layers and layer masking in photoshop. This results, in my own personal opinion, in a far superior image without any blown out details in the sky.

I took pics of the sun early morn and as it shines through the trees
on my bed, the pics I took looked like red flowers petals and there were
many different shapes and round blue spheres and red ones too. Could
anyone pls explain to me these shapes?

This picture is beautiful. I absolutley love how all the colors complement each other and they go together so well. The sky in the background is kind of an orange/pink color. Did you take this picture while the sun was coming up, or in the evening?

what I love about this photo is that the little stream in the bottom looks like it is all dried up. O is it all dried up? What is AMAZING about this photo is that you got the mountains in the background VERY GOOD PHOTO

This is my personal favorite so far since the rocks have an amazing color and the sun either rising or setting also adds to the amazing color affect. I really do wonder if the sun is rising or setting?